True Faith and Allegiance

72

Captain Carrie Ann Davenport had been back in theater for a full month, but she still had the garden party in College Park on her mind. The dead and the wounded. The man she’d killed using the pistol that her father had given her, insisting that she carry it on her body at all times, because the President of the United States, Jack Ryan, had said that it was the right of every member of the armed services.

Her dad had been right about her carrying the gun, and she’d never hear the end of it, but she wouldn’t complain about his reminding her that he told her so.

Something else had happened the day of the attack. The good-looking guy working on his master’s in history had asked her out for coffee that night. They’d both been rattled by the events and they both felt like they needed someone who’d been there to talk to.

Since that night they’d e-mailed each other almost daily, and they’d even Skyped once, which was an ordeal for her because she was at a forward operating base in southern Turkey, on the Syrian border, and it was hard to look her best.

Matt didn’t seem to care, he joked that for some reason her loose-fitting desert aircrew battle dress uniform turned him on, and she’d laughed harder at that than she’d laughed at anything in weeks.

As she sat for the briefing for tonight’s mission she had Matt on her mind, but only at first. When the major began explaining what was going on this evening, she instantly focused fully on the job at hand.

New intelligence had come out that had pinpointed the physical location of the Islamic State’s public relations division, the Global Islamic Media Front. The GIMF was responsible for nearly one hundred percent of all the high-end propaganda coming out of the Islamic State into the U.S. these days, it had its own television stations, radio stations, websites, and social media arm. This meant it was responsible for the remote-radicalized fighters springing up around the world, disaffected young men and women who pledged allegiance to the head of ISIS, then went out and committed atrocities. Since the attack in College Park over a month earlier, al-Matari’s attacks in America had diminished greatly, although sporadic attacks continued in America and in Europe. Many suggested the continuing terrorism was all done by copycats, but the United States had said nothing about the capture or killing of the terrorist leader.

Still, shutting down the GIMF, destroying its equipment and infrastructure, would be key in reducing the draw of the organization worldwide. And killing its members would erase the technical know-how that had led to the success of the global outreach of the Islamic State.

Involved in the strike into the heart of ISIS-occupied Syria tonight would be four U.S. Navy F/A-18c Hornets flown off the USS Harry S. Truman in the Mediterranean, six Army A-10 Thunderbolts flown out of southern Turkey, as well as an unspecified number of special mission units on the ground near the town of Ratla, just south of Raqqa. These ground forces would be watching Highway 4, the main artery out of Raqqa, because they had intelligence on the make and model of the Islamic State GIMF leadership’s vehicles, a remarkably specific piece of intel.

Carrie Ann couldn’t help wondering if all this plum intelligence indicated America had the bastard Abu Musa al-Matari in hand, and he was singing like a bird.

Just the possibility of this made her happy.

The special operations units would be extracted by helos from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, but two Pyro AH-64E gunships from Carrie Ann’s regiment would support tonight’s attack by flying support for any medevac flights in case one of the aircraft was shot down.

Her job would be dangerous, of course, but she thought it unlikely she and Troy would see any more action than flying a wheel formation with another Apache over the Syrian desert and watching the fireworks from thirty miles away.

It was a shame, Carrie Ann thought.

She was in the mood to kill some of those sons of bitches tonight.

At twenty-two hundred hours, Captain Davenport made one last check to her harness, tightening herself down in the front cockpit, and she scanned the three screens and 240 separate control buttons there. She and Chief Warrant Officer Troy Oakley behind her had spent the last forty-five minutes preflighting, and now they had their aircraft ready and their clearance for takeoff.

Oakley spoke into his intercom. “You ready, Captain?” Oakley was twenty-one years older than Davenport, but she was still his superior officer.

“Let’s do it, Oak.”

They taxied out to the short runway, and Oakley eased up the collective with his left hand. As the Apache rolled forward he pressed down gently on his left pedal, countering the torque of the blades above him by increasing the power to the tail rotor.

As he pulled the collective up, adding power to the main rotor blades, his left foot pushed down farther on the pedal. When he touched the cyclic between his knees forward, the blades changed angle above, and the big attack helicopter began rolling forward faster down the runway. Now he used both pedals to keep the nose of the aircraft steady as it picked up speed.

In the cockpit’s front seat, Carrie Ann watched with her hands on her knees. She had all the controls to fly Pyro 1–1 that her backseater did; in fact she did a fair amount of flying. Similarly, Oakley had the power to launch missiles and rockets, and fire the cannon from the backseat.

She almost never let Oakley fire, however, and if they did luck into any targets on this mission, tonight would be no different. Carrie Ann loved Oakley like an older brother, she’d do anything in the world for the man, but she fired the weapons in Pyro 1–1.

With the collective at full power and the speed at forty-five knots, Oakley pulled back slightly on the cyclic, and the eight-ton Apache lifted into the air. Just behind it, Pyro 1–2 lifted off seconds later.

They stayed low, left the FOB in an eastwardly heading to fool any ISIS spies nearby with a cell phone and a mission to report helicopter flights into Syria, and then, ten minutes later, they began climbing as they turned to the south for their standoff station thirty miles northeast of Raqqa.

Ninety minutes after takeoff, Davenport and Oakley flew over empty desert in complete darkness, with Pyro 1–2 and Freight Train 1–1, a Chinook CH-47D, both doing the same things at different altitudes. Carrie Ann caught glimpses of the other aircraft through her FLIR monitor from time to time, but mostly her eyes were on the southwest, where a fireworks show of attacking and defending was taking place.

She couldn’t hear the Navy radio traffic, but she could listen in on the A-10s following on to the attack in Raqqa firing Hellfire missiles, and it sounded like the mission was going to plan.

All the U.S. aircraft were using Hellfires only, which caused a relatively small amount of damage as compared to JDAMs or big iron bombs, and other ordnance that the F-18s and A-10s could carry. But the target location was in downtown Raqqa, and collateral damage had to be kept to a minimum, so this necessitated several runs from each aircraft to pick the buildings apart, as opposed to a single pass from a couple of Hornets to flatten the area with two-thousand-pound bombs.

The enemy was firing a huge number of ZU-23 antiaircraft cannons, their tracers arced into the sky, but so far the Navy and Army fixed-wing attack had suffered no casualties.

Even the report from an A-10 pilot that a Stinger missile had locked on to his aircraft turned into a non-event, as the weapon apparently lost the lock because of hills or buildings.

Forty-five minutes after the attack began, all the aircraft had egressed the area. The Pyro and Freight Train flights were ordered to reposition to the south while the Black Hawks of the 160th came in to pull their special mission units out of the area, so they set course for another spot of desert, where they would fly another pattern.

Carrie Ann watched while a pair of high-tech Black Hawk helos raced far beneath her, just over the rolling sand, on their way south to pick up their Delta Force or SEAL Team operators.

Seconds after Carrie Ann lost sight of the Black Hawks, the combat controller came over her headset, telling her he was patching her through to the JTAC frequency on the ground in Ratla. This surprised her, as the Joint Terminal Attack Controller was embedded with the special operations troops, and he was in charge of directing aircraft and artillery fire on targets. He might have been used during the attack phase of tonight’s mission, although Ratla was far enough away from the target location to where she doubted it. But she couldn’t imagine why he wanted to speak with Pyro flight, especially since his extraction helos were on the way.

Seconds later a crackling voice came over her headset. “Pyro One-One, this is Lethal. How copy?”

“Pyro One-One. Solid copy. Send traffic, Lethal.”

“I am a JTAC embedded with SF.” He read off his grid coordinates to her and she typed them into her computer. “I have no more air assets in the area, but multiple targets just appeared, my sector. A convoy of eight vehicles, confirmed squirters from target location.” He read off the grid and she tapped this in, saw on her moving map display that the vehicles were on Highway 4 and heading east, between the towns of Ratla and just south of the Euphrates River. JTAC asked, “Are you available to prosecute these targets at this time? Over.”

Troy could hear the conversation, and he confirmed they had thirty-five minutes of flying time.

Freight Train was armed only with door gunners, so Pyro 1–2 would have to return with the Chinook to Turkey. This left Carrie Ann and Troy alone to fly south, into ISIS territory, to attack the convoy.

She did not hesitate. “Affirmative, Lethal. We are one Apache with eight Hellfires, seventy-two rockets, and nine hundred dual-use cannon rounds. We are on the way. ETA eleven minutes.”

“Roger that. I’ll talk you right to them. We are waving off our extraction until you smoke these guys.”

Carrie Ann’s heart began pounding against the steel plate on her chest. Troy came over the intercom, all business, giving her his plan for hitting the highway from the east, so that they could rake the length of the convoy and maximize their effectiveness.

Thirteen minutes later they banked hard to the east at an altitude of only one thousand feet, and Carrie Ann selected a Hellfire missile. When the convoy rolled out of a village, still heading east just south of the Euphrates, she said, “Firing Hellfire,” and launched at the lead technical. The plan was to destroy the first vehicle and then send wave after wave of Hydra rockets into the convoy.

The Hellfire struck the technical, blowing it apart and whiting out the FLIR screen for an instant, then pilot Troy Oakley went to maximum speed. Through the targeting system over Davenport’s right eye, Oakley could see red crosshairs over his own aiming device that told him exactly where his front-seater was aiming. Through this he could line up the rockets directly on her intended target.

“Firing,” she said again, her voice clipped and intense. A dozen Hydras launched in quick succession, and raced across the highway below toward their target two kilometers to the west.

Before the first even struck, Carrie Ann called, “Cannon!” and switched now to her cannon. This she could aim herself just by moving her head, and she fired burst after burst at the convoy.

On her FLIR she could see multiple explosions down the length of the convoy from the rockets, and then the cannon fire tore through them, eviscerating the soft-skinned vehicles. She could see individuals running off the highway into fields along the Euphrates, but they would have to turn for another pass before taking out any of the ISIS operatives on foot.

Oakley began lining up for a pass from the west, when warning sensors shrieked in the cockpit, announcing a radar lock on Pyro 1–1.

Oakley shouted, “SAM!” as soon as he knew a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile was coming their way.

The automatic countermeasures on the Apache began launching flares as Oakley put the aircraft into a steep dive for speed and a corkscrew to outfox the approaching missile. Carrie Ann grabbed on to handles and watched a cultivated field fill up her windscreen and grow larger by the second. She closed her eyes, certain they would auger into the dirt, but Oakley pulled out of the dive and leveled out, sending Carrie Ann pressing deeply into her seat and her stomach retching.

The SAM passed by, but now they were only fifty feet off the ground and racing over the highway, just a couple hundred yards from anyone who survived the onslaught of Hellfire, cannon, and rocket fire. Carrie Ann saw tracer fire from heavy machine guns right over her, dancing by her cockpit from left to right, and then she heard a rapid punching sound below her feet.

Through the intercom she heard Oakley call out to her in a hoarse voice. “Carrie! Your ship!”

In the front seat Carrie Ann was surprised by Troy’s call, but she took her eyes out of her weapons screens and looked instead out the front glass. Simultaneously she grabbed the cyclic with her right hand and the collective with her left.

“My ship!” she said. She was about to ask just why Oakley was handing piloting duties over to her when he spoke again. His voice was weaker this time.

“I’m hit.”

“Where are you hit?”

“Took a… took a shot through the canopy. Might have ricocheted, but it’s got me in the neck. I’m bleeding pretty good.”

“Jesus,” she said. “We’re heading back.”

“Negative,” Oakley said. “Press the attack!”

Captain Davenport ignored her backseater and raced north away from the highway, low over the Euphrates, as more tracer fire whipped around her from multiple directions.

“Press the attack,” he said again.

“When we get back we can watch the gun cams together. We took out every one of those eight vehicles, and seventy-five percent of the personnel. That’s a good night’s work.”

Oakley did not respond.

“Oak? Hang in there, Oak, you good?”

“Roger that,” he said, but she could tell he was about to pass out.

And then she looked down at her screen, and saw her oil pressure dropping.

Captain Carrie Ann Davenport landed the wounded Apache in the middle of the open desert ten minutes later, raised the canopy, and unfastened her harness. The 160th Black Hawk helicopters that picked up the special operations forces in Ratla were minutes out from her position and inbound, and there were multiple Special Forces — trained medics on board.

In the meantime, she knew she had to stop Oakley’s bleeding and get him unhooked and ready for transport.

She crawled over the backseat, pulling a rag from her cargo pocket as she did so. The blood covering the left side of Oakley’s body was incredible, visible in the soft orange light of the controls and displays in front of him. He was unconscious or dead, she did not know which, but she would treat him the best she could, no matter what. She pressed the towel hard against his neck with her right hand, hopefully stanching the blood flow, and with her left she unhooked his harness.

It was twelve feet down from Oakley’s seat to the sand, and there was no way in hell any front-seater, much less a five-foot-four, 120-pound female front-seater, could get a wounded pilot down from there without help, so Carrie Ann didn’t even try. She just used her med kit to cut away his ABDUs, minimize the blood loss, and get controls, wires, and anything else out of the way that would slow down his movement to a hospital.

A single Black Hawk landed while the second provided top cover, and Carrie climbed back into the front seat to shut down the aircraft, getting herself out of the way while three fit men with beards fought to get the unconscious man out of his seat down to the stubby weapons pylon, and then handed off to four other men on the ground. He was placed on a backboard and rushed over to the waiting UH-64, and Carrie grabbed her rifle, Oakley’s rifle, and ran after them.

In the Black Hawk on the way back into Turkey she held Oakley’s hand tightly as she knelt down over him. Medics worked frantically on his neck, as well as another wound they’d found above his left knee.

A young man in full battle rattle and a beard seated just behind her touched her on her back, and she turned around to look at him. He said, “Our docs are the best. Your dad’s gonna be fine.”

She nodded at the joke, started to look back down to Oakley, and the young man said, “I’m Lethal.” He was the JTAC who had talked her into the target.

“Davenport,” she said.

“Just have to say, Captain, you fucking kicked ass back there. Your ship pretty much single-handedly destroyed any chance that ISIS could get their propaganda machine back up and running after the Navy blew the shit out of their building.”

She thanked him, knelt back down over Oakley, and saw his eyes were open and fixed on hers now. She smiled and tears dripped onto his face. “Hey!”

He smiled back. “Hey.”

“JSOC just said you and me kicked ass. That’s not so bad, is it?”

He tried to shake his head, but the backboard wouldn’t let him. He smiled. “Not half bad at all, Captain.”

An hour later, an A-10 was launched out of Turkey to destroy Pyro 1–1 with a five-hundred-pound bomb, making certain the enemy didn’t have anything to use as a propaganda weapon.

At roughly the same time the Apache blew apart in the desert, Chief Warrant Officer Troy Oakley died on an operating table at Incirlik Air Base.